1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to network usage data. More particularly, the present invention relates to the extraction of logical events from network data.
2. Description of the Related Art
The process of analyzing Internet-based actions such as web surfing patterns is known as web analytics. One part of web analytics is understanding how user traffic flows through a network (also known as user paths). This typically involves analyzing which nodes a user encounters when accessing a particular network. In large networks such as, for example, large search engine/directories, billions of pageviews may be generated per day. As such, analyzing this huge amount of data can be daunting. Such analysis is needed, however, to determine common user behavior in order to optimize the network for better user engagement and network integration.
When running multiple queries against a given set of data, answering those queries can be very time-consuming. Business needs often require querying some table against different sets of conditions and identifying the records that satisfy each set. Businesses view the occurrence of each such set of values in the data as a logical event that occurred, and want to know how many times such an event occurred. For example, if the data being queried are web logs and contain the identification of each page visited, then the business may be interested in knowing how many times a particular page was visited. The business may have a number of such distinct logical events defined and would want to query the web logs in the least possible time to obtain the results.
Executing a separate query for each set is very inefficient because each record will need to be fetched multiple times. Depending on the size of the data being queried and the number of queries, this process may take a long time.
What is needed is a solution that allows multiple queries to be executed against a set of records at the same time in an efficient manner.